Are you pulling your hair out and going bald because some of your military dwarves mysteriously keep going bald themselves? Are you freaking out because the dwarf you told to equip that full suit of bismuth bronze armor isn't wearing it, and now it's missing? Are you a modder who used the vanilla graphics_creatures_layered.txt as the basis for your modded race, only to discover your seemingly perfectly functional mod was causing problems with bismuth bronze? Well, it's not your fault. This is a vanilla problem - the vanilla layered graphics RAWs do not specify any sprites for items made of bismuth bronze, and the fix is super easy. Like, "one find and replace" easy.
Open graphics_creatures_layered.txt (or the equivalent file in your mod if you're dabbling with modding) in NotePad++. Open the Find and Replace window (Ctrl+H) and turn regular expressions on:
FIND:
\[CONDITION_MATERIAL_TYPE:METAL:BLACK_BRONZE\]
REPLACE:
[CONDITION_MATERIAL_TYPE:METAL:BLACK_BRONZE]\n [CONDITION_MATERIAL_TYPE:METAL:BISMUTH_BRONZE]
(You can probably do this without regular expressions turned on as well if that's intimidating for you or whatever, just remove the "\"s in the FIND string and "\n" in the replace. Using regex just keeps the raw file tidy.)
Et voila, your mysteriously unarmored baldies should now look like the badasses you always intended them to be. This was also probably a problem with wielded bismuth bronze weapons/picks/axes (almost certainly -
no bismuth bronze sprites whatsoever are specified in the layered creatures raws, but I haven't seen the issue with my own two eyes so I'm couching this in uncertainty).
BEFORE:
AFTER:
NOTE:
I don't know if updating the vanilla RAWs manually will import them to an existing save. Tested with my BF's vanilla save and a modded vanilla RAW, and unless he screwed something up in a major way it doesn't work for unmodded games without generating a new world. I know for a fact that it's compatible with existing saves when it comes to editing the appropriate file in the "installed mods" folder (see the pics above, that's my 'deep dwarf' race, and it's the same deep dwarf in both pics). If updating the vanilla RAWs truly doesn't work for existing saves, as long as you have even *one* mod running you can
maybe work around this by adding a text file which will cut the accursed vanilla file and also adding your edited copy of the vanilla file to
any mod's graphics folder (or even by adding a graphics folder to an installed mod with no graphical component and doing the same - I haven't experimented with any of this though so take with a huge grain of salt).